What’s non-invasive disk recovery?

Quite often our experts have to perform hard disk recovery from HDD affected by large amounts of damaged unreadable sectors. Hard drive having numerous bad sectors is not able to operate properly: it slows down dramatically, it is giving various error messages including dreadful “blue screen of death”, sometimes disappears or shows unreadable volumes under “My Computer”, sometimes it makes occasional clicking sounds. This problem can affect any hard drive regardless of type, brand, model and size.

Please note that it is very dangerous to use “over-the-counter” software disk recovery solutions to cure this problem, in most cases they will simply kill your drive completely before you get hold of your precious data! Bad sectors tend to develop catastrophically, without proper handling they will eventually cause a head crash or even unrecoverable scoring of magnetic platters.

Disk Recovery

Disk recovery from HDD affected by bad sectors problem is performed by using very sophisticated (and expensive!) professional data recovery tools. Unlike simple sector-by-sector imagers these intelligent tools are able to avoid damaged areas as much as possible, selectively targeting critical file system objects (boot sectors, bitmaps, master file tables, catalog files or superblocks) to get immediate access to most important user’s files and carefully extract them.

Bad Sectors

Several years ago a large number of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives were bricked by infamous “busy bug”. Disks affected by this bug won’t be registered in computer’s OS and not visible in the BIOS on power-up. The symptom of the problem is that the drive stays in busy state all the time and upon connecting to the drive’s circuit board with a serial terminal there’s an error code “LED:000000CC FAddr:0024A051”. The reason for such malfunction is faulty firmware (microcode controlling drive’s operation) implemented by Seagate engineers. Numerous users have complained of this issue and were discussing it in public forums when discussions in the official Seagate forum were subjected to heavy moderation and subsequently closed.

Disk recovery from HDD affected by firmware issues is usually performed by correcting and/or rewriting corrupt service modules.